People with visual disabilities are among the many who venture onto the Internet to traverse the World Wide Web (“the web”). The visually impaired, however, would miss much of the richness of the Internet, if not for screen reader software programs. In general, a screen reader makes personal computers accessible to blind or visually impaired users by using a speech synthesizer and the computer's sound card to read aloud the information appearing upon the computer's monitor screen. Accordingly, when a web page appears on the user's screen, the screen reader program reads aloud the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) layout and words on the web page.
A relatively recent trend, however, presents new challenges to the traditional screen reader program. The web is moving towards a programmable platform with emerging technologies, such as mashups, lightbox popups, and various other methods to display information to users. Typically, such emerging technologies devise new uses for HTML markup attributes and lead to new HTML standards. Meanwhile, if a conventional screen reader program encounters an undefined or non-standard attribute in a web page, the screen reader program either reads this information to a user, or generates an error report to indicate they have encountered HTML protocol that is non-standard or in error. A problem, however, is that often these presumably non-standard attributes are actually valid attributes being deployed by an emerging technology. Thus, as the use of HTML markup attributes outpaces HTML standards, or as new HTML standards emerge, screen readers must offer new versions to adapt to the changes. Screen readers, however, are simply unable to keep pace with technology.